[GRLUG] strange audio levels problem

[Michael Mol]

'alsactl store' will save your sound settings so that they get
restored on bootup. That's reasonable and good.

Your problem is that PulseAudio is a per-user system, whereas ALSA is
system-wide. Here's what's most likely going on:

1) Your system enters its init sequence
2) Your system restores the ALSA settings saved by alsactl.
3) You log in
4) The first app to access PulseAudio (either directly or via the
ALSA->Pulse wrapper library) will spawn the PA daemon.
5) The PA daemon will adjust its internal mixer levels, and the ALSA
levels, as needed in order to satisfy whatever requests are made of
it.

Step 2 is where things start to go wrong, step 5 is where they're
going to go *really* wrong. In general, you're going to want ALSA
configured to its maximum clean volume output. (For my sound chipset,
this means loading up alsamixer and adjusting each level until each
gain level reads '0').

Once ALSA is configured to a good normalized baseline at system start,
your desktop session's sound daemon should behave better.

Two good links to go over if you're running Pulse, regardless of what
distro you're using:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio
http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup

On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 6:27 AM, John-Thomas Richards <jtr at jrichards.org> wrote:
> I'm running LMDE (Linux Mint with Debian Wheezy).  I'm getting strange
> behavior from my sound settings.  I save them via `alsactl store' at the
> following levels:
>
> Master          Speaker         PCM
> 80              100             100
>
> If I restart they will be changed to random levels.  For example, I just
> rebooted and the settings are:
>
> 0 (muted) | 2 (muted) | 99
>
> Sometimes they will be:
>
> 40 (muted) | 0 (muted) | 100
>
> I store the levels as root.  This box is also running PulseAudio.  The
> PulseAudio level is also often muted and at a low level (20 or 25 or
> 40).  Any ideas?  Sound just seems to be far too complicated these days.
> This almost (almost!) makes me wish for the OSS days.
> --
> john-thomas
> ------
> I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much
> liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
> Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
>
> --
> This message has been scanned for viruses and
> dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
> believed to be clean.
>
> _______________________________________________
> grlug mailing list
> grlug at grlug.org
> http://shinobu.grlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/grlug
>



-- 
:wq

-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.